I had been using Linux from very early on. Although I had primarily worked with SunOS/Solaris and HP-UX systems, a fellow programmer introduced me to Yggdrasil Linux. I started using it full time, and eventually moved to Debian, which I used for nearly 20 years.

But today, Linux is pretty much dead to me. Systemd and GNOME 3, among other changes, have effectively ruined it for me. Nothing ruins a Linux user's experience more than having their system not boot fully due to some obscure, and usually stupid, problem involving systemd. The GNOME 3 desktop is, in my opinion, totally unusable. The other desktop environments aren't much better.

When I use Linux today, it feels more like I'm using Windows than it does I'm using a *nix-like system.

I know that I can use an archaic distro like Slackware, or an inconvenient one like Gentoo, or a hobbyist distro like Devuan. But none of those really meet my needs. All I really want is the Debian we had just a few years ago, right before the switch to systemd and GNOME 3: stable, reliable, trustworthy and fun to use.

After systemd prevented my Debian system from booting much too often, I switched to FreeBSD. It gives me everything Linux used to give me, but now it gives me so much more. Its excellent ZFS support is a game-changer. Its reliability is truly amazing. It performs very well. Most importantly, I trust its developers to do the right thing, and preserve the In hindsight, I wish I had switched to FreeBSD much earlier.

I'm on Windows 10 right now (actually, as I type this) and I don't have any of the problems you're having. It boots flawlessly every time, updates itself regularly with security patches, and the user interface is industry standard and eminently usable. It never crashes, and if a rogue program does it is isolated and easily dispatched. I can sit down at any workstation either at my place of employment or a friend's house and get right to work - no acclimatization needed. And I know that any software I wa

I'm on Windows 10 right now (actually, as I type this) and I don't have any of the problems you're having. It boots flawlessly every time, updates itself regularly with security patches, and the user interface is industry standard and eminently usable. It never crashes, and if a rogue program does it is isolated and easily dispatched. I can sit down at any workstation either at my place of employment or a friend's house and get right to work - no acclimatization needed. And I know that any software I want or need will run natively on my OS - no tricks, hoops, or work-arounds. I couldn't be more pleased.

Some anonymous [slashdot.org] troll said:.. "I had been using Linux from very early on.. But today, Linux is pretty much dead to me.. The GNOME 3 desktop is, in my opinion, totally unusable. The other desktop environments aren't much better."..

"But today, Linux is pretty much dead to me. Systemd and GNOME 3, among other changes, have effectively ruined it for me. Nothing ruins a Linux user's experience more than having their system not boot fully due to some obscure, and usually stupid, problem involving systemd."

It is interesting that almost all the complaints about systemd seem to be from Debian users.

I use a number of systemd-based distros, from desktops to productiom servers, and have never seen problems like this.

Frankly, if you're a "very early" Linux user, you should damn well know that there are other desktop environments around, and non-desktop environments too (just pick a window manager and that's it!)

That said, there is some brain damage coming from the freedesktop crew that is really hard to avoid. Did you know that PolicyKit -- something that is pretty much needed to run X -- nowadays needs mozilla's javascript interpreter to run?

Why, you ask? Well, they decided to make it user-configurable, give it hooks.

There is so much ignorance in this comment. This guy seems to equate linux with a desktop environment.
In the server side linux is the dominating operating system, and in the desktop side there are so many options to GNOME. I dislike GNOME too, I use LXDE or Xfce for that reason, but from that simple issue to say linux is dead there is a big distance. This comment is a complete nonsense.

I've been at this long enough to remember when Linux and Open Source as a dev model where all but laughed at by industry as not and will never amount to anything. Fast forward to know and Linux runs on everything and the Open Source dev model rules the day. But does it run Linux? But what doesn't! I am satisfied that we have achieved "The day of Linux on the desk\laptop." Going back a few decades, I don't think most people suspected we would be surrounded by all manner of things running Linux.

In fact, Google could probably swap out the Linux kernel for the FreeBSD kernel or some other kernel, and Android developers and especially users would have no idea it had happened!

In fact, given how Google doesn't like the GPL and goes out of its way to remove GPL 3 components - which is why they've been removing GNU parts - why don't they just swap out Linux for either Minix 3.x or FreeBSD/NetBSD? Preferably Minix. That way, they'll have a minimal kernel, and they can pack all their services on top of it as a part of the subsystem.

Linux is absolutely community driven. What has changed if the definition of the community driving it.Today, you can by a PC costing $35 and a case to put it in for $5 and power cable for $3 that will run Linux reasonably well. You would have to add storage and that can often be as expensive as $200, but it doesn't have to be. This is all possible due to wide community interest in Linux and open source and in many cases because of the grass-roots community surrounding it and driving it.

Linux is a great success, but it's also a fairly lonely success for the FSF. Pretty much none of the consumer devices running Linux can be altered in any practical way because they have locked boot loaders and only take signed updates. And the user space is pretty much all Apache 2.0, not GPL which doesn't really grant you any rights to the source code shipping with your device. Open source has made it pretty big, but I'd say Linux is an oddity.

No one said anything about FSF. FSF != the Open Source community or movement. Sure, they have done a lot for it and are a part of it. Something or other about mutual exclusivity comes into play here. I really do not follow your logic at all.

But I don't fully agree w/ AC. Reason HURD failed was that they took forever, and are still not done! They kept experimenting w/ different microkernels - all except the one most openly documented - Minix - before returning to GNU Mach. Microkernels have advanced a whole lot in concept, and Minix illustrates the possibilities. Given all that, it's a disgrace that HURD is where it is.

Agreed. Looking back I remember being a big believer in Hurd as maybe not THE next big thing, but an upcoming major player. As I grew to understand the internal politics of the FSF, I ultimately dismissed it. They should swallow their pride and have their way with the Linux kernel, they are all about GNU General, and it's already there. It's not like they can't overhaul it to their hearts content and call it GNUHurd\Linux. They already have Debian GNU/HURD - Debian with the Hurd kernel. I get it that they a

Actually, Stallman did throw in the towel and embrace Linux, but that was not my point. My point was that since HURD was a GNU project to create a microkernel based kernel, they should have explored what was out there. The best documented microkernel OSs were Amoeba and later Minix 3.x. So they should have explored using those kernels as their basis. As it is, those microkernels are BSDL licensed, so GNU could have forked it under GPL3, and built on that. Instead of trying unheard of microkernels like

Maybe, but the Minix of the 80s/90s wasn't a microkernel. Amoeba was, but that wasn't what was being considered. Minix got the BSDL in version 3, which was also the first microkernel version of the OS. Since HURD was exclusively looking for microkernels, they should have considered Minix.

Yeah, given RMS' hostility to the 'Open Source' movement, a whole bunch of them would not have touched HURD w/ a bargepole had Linux never existed. They'd probably have flocked to one of the BSD projects or Sun.

Why would it have been a poor man's alternative, when 386BSD's forks - FreeBSD and NetBSD were introduced and have made a whole lot of progress despite all the efforts being focused on Linux? Had Linus not chosen GPL, the FSF could have just forked NetBSD into a GPLed OS of their own, put in all their own tools and run w/ it. In fact, they could have made HURD successful had they picked Minix or Amoeba for the microkernel

Yes but Google is also a bastard company. I often wonder what their "Do no evil" motto is relative to. They have been falling out of favor with me for several years now. I am quite perturbed by their many monopolies on information. As a company, they are certainly the anti-FSF. Then again, the FSF so mired in impractical philosophy, their lack of relevance and influence is their own fault. All the same, they may yet see their day. Time will tell. People see ourselves as entrenched in wild computer\communica

I'd also add that calling Android "Linux" is like saying you have a Ferrari because you taped fake paddle shifters to the steering wheel of your 1983 Toyota Carolla.

I'm pretty sure Linux is still the name of Linus' project first and the collection of technologies that happen to like running on top of that kernel second. And they very much like to count Android and busybox when making statistics or the Linux is everywhere posts. People only get religious about GNU/Linux when it's time to make no true Scotsman posts.

But this is X windows from 1994, and the concept of a desktop didn't exist yet. My options were either FVWM (a virtual window manager) or TWM (the tabbed window manager). TWM was straightforward to set up and provided a simple, yet functional, graphical environment.

I'm not sure how those modes differ from a "desktop", but it's clear he's specifically talking about X Windows' implementation. The quote in the summary is taken horribly out of context.

Window managers (at least in those days) generally did not provide widget trays, launch menus, or other things you usually see on an empty modern-day computer desktop. They decorated each window with controls -- one or more resizing buttons, a frame on at least one side of the window, and usually a system menu -- and arranged icons for minimized applications. fvwm was notable for providing virtual workspaces.

On the other hand, the Common Desktop Environment (CDE, whence KDE got its name) was first released in 1993, so there was not just the concept of a desktop environment for X back then, but even a shipping implementation. CDE was not very nice to use -- where I was introduced to Linux in the mid-'90s, fvwm2 was much more popular -- but it is clearly recognizable as a predecessor to modern computer desktops.

Not to mention SGI and Solaris systems that had rather advanced xwindows base UI. Even window 3.1 was out.

I found that statement to be ignoring the fact that Linux has been lagging in the desktop UI. Until the mid 2000's where device plug and play started to work. And simple things today like all the apps available in the GUI window menu were actually installed on the system. Wasn't always the case.

The first version of Linux I ever played around with was from a book with CDs about Slackware in 1997. Must have been an old version as it never worked with my Socket 7 motherboard with an AMD K5 processor. Back then it was compile and pray to get anything working. I later ran SuSE 5 through 10. Switched to Ubuntu for a while. Fedora and Mint are my favorite distros for work. These days I use Red Hat at home in case I ever get a job that required Red Hat experience.

I've only built Linux From Scratch once. It was clearly something where you got as much out of it as you put into it. Any idiot could build a functioning system by blindly following the rules. Or, you could pay attention to what is going on, or deviate from the predefined recipe, and learn something.

I find it highly unlikely you're running a Mint or Fedora desktop in a Windows environment, and anybody who's not a complete idiot would never run those distributions on servers for work purposes.

When I worked at Cisco, I had to set up some laptops running Linux to test 11ac wireless cards. The engineers prefer Fedora for their Linux-only laptops. On some of the older laptops, I had to use Mint Linux instead because of hardware compatibility issues.

@Anonymous Coward [informatica.co.cr]: "One thing I'd always been told is that it's not X Windows, and not to call it that. There are plenty of alternatives like X, X11, and the X Window System. All of those are fine, but it is incorrect to call it X Windows. I'd totally understand it as a newbie mistake, but not from a tech news site for nerds."

Except, that's a direct quote from the SLS install file: 'Getting X-windows [informatica.co.cr] to run on your PC can sometimes be a bit of a sobering experience'

Manchester Computer Center (MCC) Interim Linux zero-dot-something. A boot floppy and IIRC four more floppies for a system capable of compiling the kernel. I didn't have enough memory for X, but found and installed the MGR simple windowing system.

I was enjoying 2016, the year of the Linux desktop, on my Linux desktop and saw the news and thought, "Wow, after having the first black president, we're going to have the first woman president. Things are only going to go up from here!" I was so innocent back then.